Reading Walter Johnson’s “On Agency” in the Journal of Social History made me rethink a lot of my responses to Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004). Camp’s goal is worthy, because she sought to disprove prevalent notions of slaves as accommodationist to their enslavement. Camp focuses on enslaved women to elucidate their living and working conditions, cultural experiences, and family life. She also shows how they engaged in acts of resistance to their enslavement in their daily lives. Camp’s book is about agency, a concept that Walter Johnson argues more historians need to use more carefully. He cautions historians against ascribing meaning to slave actions while actually obscuring “important questions about both the way in which enslaved people theorized their own actions and the practical process through which those actions provided the predicate for new ways of thinking about slavery and resistance” (Johnson, 118). One of Camp’s strengths is that she does ask these important questions about what the slaves thought and is careful in her analysis of the evidence. As for the evidence, Camp uses personal slave narratives, white planter papers, oral histories such as WPA interviews, and various other sources to construct a convincing picture of the lives of enslaved women.
Camp argues that male planters engaged in a “geography of containment” to control the slaves’ movement. This is a theme that runs throughout the book. For example, her chapter on “the bondage of space an time” demonstrates why planters sought to limit slaves’ movement to the plantations. Subsequent chapters look at modes of escape: truancy, the role of women in aiding slaves’ escape, and a hidden institution in the form of the illegal party. Camp further supports her thesis about the geography of space by examining the spaces within slave homes to see how bondswomen used abolitionist materials in their cabins to advance liberation ideology in the South.
Another main theme of the book is “the dissolving of common distinctions” between individual women and collective communities. She shows that pleasure and politics were not always separate in her discussion of how women “created ‘third bodies’ that were sites of pleasure and resistance” at their hidden parties. Her final chapter also dissolves the distinctions between “day-to-day” resistance and mass action (9). This chapter most compellingly shows that slave women did indeed engage in resistance and knew what it meant for themselves and their families.
Camp’s book came out a year after Walter Johnson’s 2003 essay. I see her book as a sort of direct response to the kind of work Johnson laments is widespread. She works directly against the “classic social scientific dichotomies” that characterize many of the works on agency. Johnson wrote in “On Agency”: “As I hinted above, the terms ‘everyday’ and ‘revolutionary’ have, at least in the literature on slavery, been allowed for too long to stand in unproductive opposition to one another rather than being thought of as dialectically interrelated” (118). Camp blurs the distinction between the political and the personal, the hidden and informal and the visible and organized. She argues against an understanding of resistance as primarily “public” because it “limits our understanding of human lives in the past, especially women’s” (3). Since much of Johnson’s argument is predicated on a critique of the idea that public resistance was a way to “preserve their humanity” (a very subjective concept), it is refreshing that Camp approaches the history of enslaved women with more nuance and shows that not engaging in overt resistance did not make some of these women any less human.